


your bones are mine to save (my bones are yours to break)

by biggrstaffbunch



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Gen, M/M, Mentions of Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-09
Updated: 2014-09-09
Packaged: 2018-02-16 17:35:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2278629
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/biggrstaffbunch/pseuds/biggrstaffbunch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Come get me if you're gonna fight, Steve," he says. You try to remember.</p>
            </blockquote>





	your bones are mine to save (my bones are yours to break)

"Come get me if you're gonna fight, Steve," he says. You try to remember.

All of five feet tall, and Bucky's already swaggering like he's a bona fide pugilist, nose in the air and smirk on his face. You can't begrudge the self-confidence in your friend's voice, though, not when it's balanced against poorly-veiled worry.

He's a kid, but he's got a parent's tendency to overprotect. You've seen the three smaller Barneses, a trio of little girls with dark hair and smudged noses, all trailing after Bucky on the threadbare floor of the family's flat. Behind his cocky grin is a kid who lies awake at night, wondering where the next dollar is coming from, arm curled protectively around whichever skinny-limbed sibling it is who's crawled into bed with him on a given night.

If there was only one reason he's your best friend, it'd have to be his heart— the enormous, unbelievable, incredible expanse of it.

So when he grabs your shoulder and digs his thumb into your collarbone, anchoring you to the ground, eyes staring bright blue holes into your face, pleading for you not to go at it on your own, you stop. You listen.

And you try to remember.

 

|

 

It just gets harder, is all, the older you get.

 

|

 

You’re small and you’re sick and the doctors are amazed you made it to your eighteenth birthday, let alone that you’re still breathing. So maybe you should count your blessings that you made it this far. But it makes you mad, because it ain’t fever or disease that’s gonna kill you now.

It’s your own goddamned mouth.

You have no patience for bullies, is all. Watching someone abuse their power, well. It slips under your skin and stirs up the devil inside. And since your fists are useless—you pretend otherwise, but know better—the only weapons you can use are your mind, which is quick and keen, and your words, which are sharp and knowing. “Like a knife, Steve,” Bucky says, when you get particularly ornery. “Shoved right under a fella’s ribs, cut ‘em straight through.”

You sometimes forget, when Bucky sounds so proud of your skill, that others don’t take too kindly to being heckled.

The foot to your ribs is reminding you now.

Every kick and punch is curling you in half, sending shockwaves of pain and wretched nausea rolling through you. There’s an ingrained, almost helpless instinct to keep getting back up again. For a second, just a split second, you wish you could take the advice Bucky gives in his more desperate complaints and just s _tay down_. Maybe then the rain of blows would stop. Maybe then you could breathe and not bleed again.

The bully is muttering low invectives, and every fresh hit is sending you closer to your maker. You feel a bone break. Your lungs go tight and your vision goes dim. Still, you try to rise on your elbows, blood smeared hot on your upper lip and every inch of you sore.

There’s a distant part of you that resents the idea of needing rescuing. But the smarter part, the one that knows you’re going to end up a smear in this dirt soon enough, is screaming for some kind of aid.

Funny; the bitter pill of your silent plea is made a little easier by the fact that “help” always comes out an awful lot like “Bucky” in your head.

"Get the  _fuck_ offa him!!”

And, lo. There, like the scrappy, blue-eyed, messy-haired avenging angel that he is, stands your best pal.

He looks sweaty and frazzled, like he’s run through the streets looking for you, and you can imagine him now, a tangle of long limbs and loud curses, peeking into every back alley he can find. You want to laugh at the picture in your head, because you’re kind of an ass, but your chest feels broken.

At the small sound you make, Bucky’s eyes fall on you for a fraction of an instant, even as he launches himself at the monster that laid you low. For that frozen second, you feel your stomach bottom out at the vivid horror and relief and fear on Bucky’s face, buried under the incandescent rage painted right on the surface. He looks like he’s a little kid again, and then you remember that the two of you  _are_ kids, fighting men who’re twice as tall and who have fifty pounds of muscle on you both. 

It’s okay if you get yourself killed. But suddenly, you’re locked with wretched fear that you’re going to get Bucky dead, too.

You cough, and groan, wanting to say something to get his head back in the fight, but then he shakes himself and goes back to it on his own, swings, and ducks, and swings again, and there’s an edge of vicious satisfaction to the way his fist buries itself in the concrete expanse of the bully’s belly.

With a shallow breath and a wince, you roll over, satisfied to give your back to the scrap because as much as you want to see justice done, you don’t love violence for the sake of it. And not at the expense of Bucky’s bones, Bucky’s unbroken skin, Bucky’s happy-go-lucky day ruined because you couldn’t keep your mouth shut  _or_ finish your own battle.

You hear another punch, and a hissed, “Don’t you  _ever_  touch him again, or my hand to God, I will  _kill_ you,” and then there’s nothing but silence in the alley, broken only by the rush of blood in your ears and Bucky’s harsh breathing.

"Steve." Your name in Bucky’s mouth always sounds different, but the constant anchor is a possessive exasperation that makes you feel warm, the way people do when they know they belong somewhere, to someone. You smile, licking at the blood on your teeth, and then Bucky’s on his knees beside you, carefully rolling you over.

“ _Steve_ ,” he says again, and his face is shadowed, angry now. “You idiot,” he says. “You coulda died. He almost kicked the  _shit_ out of you.”

His hands cradle your face, ghost down your chest, circle your wrists, checking your pulse. He’s done this a million times. Taken stock. Taken care of you.

"Sorry," you slur. “‘m sorry."

"No, shut up, it’s—" Bucky breaks off, drags a hand down his face. "Steve," he says, and there’s a sheen in his eyes that you’ve never seen before. You think, with shock, that it might be tears.

"Buck—" your voice is rusty, and it hurts like shards of glass to speak, your bones screeching in protest as you try to curl your hand around Bucky’s. 

"You gotta come get me," Bucky says. "Steve. I can’t stop you from fighting. God knows, I got a mouth on me, too. I’d do just the same as you, most times. But you dummy, don’t do it  _alone_.” There’s a fractured quality to his words. “You and me, we’re—”

"Wheeler & Woolsey," you finish. Another cough, a wheeze, and you clutch your belly against the pain. Bucky’s eyes go tight with sympathy, mouth flat as he tries not to show his displeasure.

"Sure," he croaks. "And with a little practice, maybe you turn into Laurel and I turn into Hardy. But that ain’t gonna happen if you go and get yourself  _killed_. You gotta—”

He cuts off again, and you remember suddenly, with a flood of shame, that just because your parents are gone, doesn’t mean you haven’t got anyone who’d grieve if you were gone, too. You think of Bucky mirroring the picture you made after your mother died. Sitting at the kitchen table, staring into the dark, weighed down with the enormity of his own loneliness. Who would come save him, like he saved you?

If you left, who would put their hand on his shoulder and say, “Thing is, you don’t have to go at it alone,” and steer him away from forced solitude, turn him towards laughter and brotherhood and _life_?

No one, that’s who. Because you bring each other home. It rises the bile in your throat, the thought of either of you trying to make it in this world without the other.

"You gotta come get me, Steve," and Bucky’s voice breaks through your thoughts, brings you back into full awareness of your body and its multiple hurts, of the thudding, racing rhythm of your heart, of the heat of his hand in yours. His head is bowed over your chest, lashes swept over his cheekbones.

"Next time," he says. "Any fight of yours is a fight of mine. So, next time. When it matters. Come get me. Please—Steve. Come get me."

Bucky’s never said please to you in his entire life. He’s never had to. The shame comes again in a wave, this time mixed with a tenderness that makes you ache.

"Yeah," you answer. You reach up, muscles protesting, and comb your shaking, scraped fingers through Bucky’s hair. "When it matters. I’ll come get you."

 

|

 

When it matters, you  _do_ end up going to get him.

Years later. Years and years later, after you've been separated for months already, and you're not even sure if he's _alive._ As is your tendency, you forsake all reason and logic and go with instinct. Any other possibility is—untenable. Unthinkable. Bucky is alive, and he's _yours_ to find. To bring home.

And you do find him. Captured, strapped to a table, weakened and bloody, but alive. You get him, and you save him, and when he lurches onto his feet, your arm eases around his waist, carrying his weight like it's what you were born to do.

Over fire, through enemy territory, across an Austrian forest—Bucky never lets you carry him again. But your center of gravity has already adjusted to his. Your body will always know.

He hovers in the threshold of the tent at camp, awkward and quiet. He says  _thank you_ and you scoff. "You woulda done the same," you say. "Hell, you've  _done_ the same."

An arched eyebrow. "Picking up a pile of sorry bones? Cleaning up a bloody lip? Steve. You came for me. That's more than anyone else did. That's more than—"

He stops, rubs at his neck. There's a cold neutrality working its way over his expression, a curtain falling in degrees, a barrier that you can already feel. But just before his face closes off, he looks at you full-on, serious and soft.

"That's everything," he says. 

He walks out, shoulders wide, uniform askew, framed in the waning sunlight. His words keep echoing in your head, slamming against the image of his eyes, lost and hard, the crumple of his mouth, the minute tremble at the tail end of each breath.

Everything, he says. Everything, except it's not. It's _nothing_.

Your fist comes down on the wooden table in front of you. For once, what breaks is not your fingers, but the splintered surface of the table itself. An acrid taste like smoke, like ashes, lines your throat. What good is this body if failure is still the end product? 

Because yeah, you might've come for him, but you didn't save him.

Not at all.

 

|

 

And the real knife strike to your heart, is—

He just keeps on saving _you._

Your roles've reversed by now, Bucky lagging a half step behind rather than bounding ahead. Yet he's doing the same thing he's always done. Watching your back.

When you ask if he'd follow you into the jaws of death, he grins around the rim of his drink, and there was never any possibility that he'd say no, but the way he says  _yes..._

The thing is, you've seen so many pieces of yourself get stripped away and repurposed for the betterment of this country, this mission. You've become, in form if not in philosophy, an entirely different person. Bucky looks you in the eyes, and he reminds you of who you are. He picks through the blue suit and tongue-in-cheek propaganda, and he plucks Steve Rogers right out from the melee, puts  _you_ square and center for the first time since you got out of that lab with Erskine.

Where others might've killed that dumb kid from Brooklyn as dead as could be, Bucky finds a way to not only preserve him, but hold him up like a fucking beacon.

You're humbled by it. You want, more than anything, to live up to it.

So you lead the Commandos and you blow up HYDRA facilities, and you work to be worthy.

You try your hardest to be the light that guides Bucky home.

 

|

 

Doesn't mean you unlearn, oh, twenty-plus years of bad habits.

 

| 

 

"So, you grew all those muscles, I'm gettin' the science and hoodoo behind all that, but...I gotta ask. Did your brain forget to catch up?"

Bucky's voice is dry. You wince anyway. This many years, you know when he's in a mood. And he's in a mood. A mission almost gone wrong, and an explosion a little too close for comfort, but you're fine now. You made it out, and even through the smoke, you could see Bucky's face, the relief warring with annoyance.

You're tired, and aching, and you don't want to hear a lecture. But that's never stopped Bucky, not really. So in he's come, through a tent flap, hair askew.

"Just asking," he says, all sweetness and blinding, biting light.

"I made a call," you say. There'll never be a part of you that isn't beyond thankful for Bucky's companionship, beyond grateful for the way he didn't hesitate to follow you into this hell. But Christ, he can get exhausting.

"You made a—"

Bucky grabs your arm. Spins you around. Tugs you close, the way no one ever dares anymore, manhandles you without a breath wasted, because you might have a coupla inches and a whole lotta pounds of muscle on him now, but he's always known how to adjust his center of gravity to accommodate your body, your weight.

"I don't care whatever dumb fuckin' call you feel you gotta make, Steve. I know you're the captain now," and it stings, the way his voice curls around the word in a sour twist, "but my prerogative ain't listening to your  _calls_ if they're gonna get you killed."

You push back, resentful of his crowding, unsure still why he's so bitter about this, when he seemed to content to have you leading the Commandos, sitting back with a bemused lilt to his mouth.

"What's your  _prerogative_ then, Sergeant," you bite, fingers wrapped around his upper arm. His biceps are round, but you can feel bone in the slope of his shoulder. He is wasting away in degrees, staying awake and not eating. You want to soothe the wildness in his eyes, but you know—you understand the anxiety that's taken root like a sapling in the soil, growing and flourishing till it's all he can breathe. Till it's all you can see.

"To save your stupid,  _fool_ ass," Bucky snaps. "I hate this Captain America shit, sometimes, Steve. Hate that you think a shield is an offensive weapon all of a sudden. Hate that you think being a leader means—"

He cuts off, chokes, steps back and swipes a tired hand over his dry, dry face. He sounds like he's crying, but there's only exhaustion in his eyes, ghosts swimming in the shadows under his lashes.

"Means being alone," he completes, wretched.

You look down at your hands. They're still curved, stretched around empty air. Reaching for Bucky. Bucky, who's saved you more times than you can count. Bucky, who'd been your armor before you even became a soldier. Bucky, who thinks he's only good for killing now, when you know that actually, it's protection he's made for.

"I'm not," you say. "I'm not alone, though."

Bucky laughs, a rip through the air, a sound almost caustic. "You're not," he agrees.

There's silence between you, a thick barrier of exasperation and adrenaline and the frantic heartbeat that still hammers in Bucky's throat, in your chest.

Bucky ducks his head. Looks down at his boots, dog tags glinting in the low light. He looks like a knight of old. From the stories. Your gut clenches, imagines him with a sword, dying a bloody death, in the name of his country, his king. You.

That can't happen. It  _can't_.

You must make a sound, because Bucky peeks up at you, at the frozen horror on your face. "Hey," he says, frowning. "Stop. Steve, just."

He steps closer, touches your shoulder. Your chin. "Steve," he says again. "Just. Come  _get_ me, Jesus. Will you?"

You touch his hand, holding it under your own, feeling his warmth bleed through into your skin, melting into your bones, easing the icy terror that'd snaked through you.

"Okay," you say. "I'll come get you."

 

|

 

You try not to make a habit of promises that you can't keep.

But life, you've learned, is unavoidable that way.

 

|

 

He falls. Not too long after, you fall too.

Decades after, you rise. He doesn't.

Every cell screams out for him, sees him in strangers, in daydreams, in the quick flash of a shoulder turning the corner.

Before any shape can solidify, everything vanishes in a drift of white. Snow, endless snow. Mountains and the narrow snake of a ravine. But snow, first and most. You close your eyes and lose him, over and over. There was a train and you were on it, speeding away as he died. Was he dead before the tracks rounded the corner? Or did his pulse beat sluggishly until the cold killed him, small body in an endless expanse? You don't know; you never looked. 

His absence haunts you. A ghost. And then you meet a real ghost, a soldier in black, the emptiest eyes, the most viciously precise sort of violence.

On a causeway, you rip the mask off this man with a metal arm. And like a dart hitting the red bullseye of a previously indiscernible target, the answer strikes.

He's right there. Do you go after him? Do you surrender? Do you destroy him, so he doesn't destroy the world?

You don't know what to do, you're not sure what to—

What are you supposed to  _do_?

 

|

 

What you've always done.

 

|

 

"Your name is James Buchanan Barnes,"

His fist in your face, splitting bone, blood in your mouth.

_Wheeler and Whoolsey_

"You're my friend,"

His face twisted in anger and confusion, hair overly long and pupils blown wide.

_Laurel and Hardy_

"I'm not gonna fight you,"

_Any fight of yours is a fight of mine_

"Then finish it, because—"

Dawning realization. The veils breaking away, ice blue eyes turning warm with tears of shock and recognition. He's almost there, you've almost got him—

And then you're falling. Falling, again. 

The last thing you see before the saltwater swallows you whole is a silver hand, clutching your shirt. 

  

|

  

( _Come get me_ , he said, in all your predawn nightmares, lying in the snow, broken and buried.

You thought he was gone where you couldn't follow. 

Now, you know enough to wonder if such a place exists.)

 

|

 

"We gonna go get him?"

Sam is at your back, standing in a graveyard ready to accept a mission that was never his. He's a good friend when you were so sure you'd never have one again, and it's like drinking sunlight. You breathe into it, chest widening, ribs slipping open to welcome the happy pressure of his affection and loyalty. You'd forgotten, for awhile, what this kind of friendship feels like. What it means, how it can drive a person, push them to fight, push them to love, push them to  _save_.

You turn, eyes already on a distant horizon, mapping the pathway that'll lead you where you need to go.

"Yeah," you respond. 

"We're gonna go get him."

 

**Author's Note:**

> response to a tumblr prompt from caughtinanocean! it's a short one, but thought i'd post it. perhaps it will encourage me to continue some of my monster WIPs!


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